Saturday, April 21, 2007

Monday, March 26, 2007

Have you ever thought to use a versionig system (SVN for example) to build an automatic online update mechanism ? NO ? Think again. It will work. I don't know the alternatives, I haven't look at any, but it works for me as follows:

You must pay a little little extra attention not to get conflicts (or if you get them, to overwrite them, here you must make sure you NEVER commit user settings related files) and split the update into two parts:

a "phisical" update mechanism (as oposed to logical) - phisical updates are where the versioning system will do all the job for you, updating files that changed and were commited by you to the update server and

If you have a pretty complex folder structure and want to update only what changed, SVN (or another versioning system for that matter) will do a damn good job. Some will say it's a huge hammer for a small nail but hey ? Do you want to do it right or you want to innovate a little and go into production with something that really works ?

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Q1. How many of you have online websites (be it corporate/presentation site or online business, e-commerce) ? Alright, I see you.

Q2. Now, how many of you do know the number of visits you've had yesterday (or last month, for that matter), what search engine they came from, even more, from what site referring your site they came from, how many of them were new and how many of them were coming back, and what country/city did they come from ? OK, I see you too.

The current post is dedicated to the guys who raised the hands in response to the second question. Anyway, if you're not in that category, please don't go away, it means you have some experience is web traffic analysis, eventually SEO (if you've done one is highly probable you've done the other one, eventually with an expert) and you can complete the post with useful info (only if interested, of course :-) )

So, as I said, as we've launched our web site, http://www.adaptiv.ro we instantly became interested in the following 2 topics:

- Web traffic analysis and assessment - With a simple script or snippet of JavaScript or JavaScript + HTML you embed in each of your pages you'll get to know, for free, a LOT of useful information about your site. You'll know how many visitors you had, where did they come from (other site or search engine), what geographical zone are they, what keywords did they use to get to you etc. This is terribly useful information to have if you really want to know where do you stand in the virtual world.

So, here is what the StatCounter.com guys have to give you for free (for a limited traffic but if you get bigger traffic than what they give for free I am sure you can afford to pay) and you have the option do that TRANSPARENTLY, you don't put your logo on your site if you don't want. I'm using them and here's several samples of what you get for free, and in real time (immediately after the hit on your site, you'll have it reported into your StatCounter account):

- A Summary, will show you how many hits(page loads), unique visitors and returning visitors you had per day, in a selectable interval- Popular pages, which pages of your site are most visited- Came from, your visitors, where did they come from ?- Visitor paths- Keyword analysis, what keywords did they searched and got to you- Country/State/City/ISP - Geographical / ISP information- AND many others, go check them out !

Also, there is Google Analytics which also contains traffic analysis, but it also has a lot of tools and reports that allow you to assess also your online business performance, including integration with Google's AddWords and other useful stuff that I'm struggling to understand at the time of this post :-)) . From what I see right now, Google Analytics is a excellent looking and performing tool. It's not real time though, but that's not exactly a problem. You can assess tomorrow, today's traffic :-D.

Adaptiv Software web site is tracked with both StatCounter and Google Analytics for purposes of testing and getting familiar with these notions. What we have left to do is to figure out how to bring more traffic to our site. Isn't it ? :-)

- SEO meaning Search Engine Optimization - how do you build your website and what content do you put into it so that it is search engine friendly ? Oh yes, the term exists and it is a VERY powerful notion, as it can decide if you get 100.000 visitors coming from Google searches or you get 1000 visitors from there.

Now I'm sure you'll get TONS of SEO articles and techniques, TONS of software programs and consultancies who'll do that for you. But if you're interested, and being given that Google is the most used search engine out there, you'll want to go and see what they have to say.

I know there are lots of SEO resources and tools out there, I'm just giving a start point.